The Outsider: Landscaping Extends Outdoor Season for Fort Greene Family

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As the days grow shorter and evenings chillier, one lucky local family is stretching the outdoor living season and enjoying fall color from four newly landscaped outdoor spaces attached to their vintage townhouse.

The ambitious program, by Folia Gardens, includes a rooftop with two distinct halves. There’s a lounge area with a fire pit and a fine view of Brooklyn’s expanding skyline at one end, and a sunny dining area at the other. Then there’s the slate-paved backyard, with a woodland feel and intensive plantings, and two small balconies at the rear of the building — one off the third floor primary bedroom and another off the top floor.

“We create garden spaces from start to finish,” said Adam Baron, founder and CEO of the Brooklyn-based company, whose services include design, installation, and maintenance, from metal and woodworking to planting and lighting. Their high-end projects have been mostly in Manhattan to date, but that is changing, Baron said.

The four-story townhouse was recently renovated for the new homeowners by the Brooklyn firm Robinson & Grisaru Architecture, who reversed a developer’s unfortunate interventions. “Robinson & Grisaru turned the interiors into warmer, more livable space — comforting and colorful, not uber-modern,” Baron said. “We wanted to create gardens similar in style, with a lot of color and texture.”

The homeowners spend most of each summer in New Hampshire. “They wanted spring and fall to be the showier months” in the Brooklyn garden spaces, Baron said. Though the plantings have four-season interest and there are roses and other summer flowers, the greater emphasis was on carefully considered early and late season material.

The back garden, now an enchanting mini-woodland surrounded by a cedar fence, was “just raw space” when Baron first laid eyes on it. “It was shocking how it looked before.” Now, a path of stone pavers runs from the ground floor under an allée of arching amelanchier (serviceberry) trees. “It creates a sense of privacy from the neighbors, and a woodsy look from above,” Baron said. “The trees will max out at 10 to 12 feet and don’t require a ton of pruning.”

The dining area is encircled by a curved retaining wall of Pennsylvania bluestone, good for perching and as a generous container for layers of plantings, including oak leaf hydrangea, pee gee hydrangea, a full moon Japanese maple chosen for its fall color, and summer-into-fall cascading plants like Roxanne geraniums and yellow coreopsis.

Larger cherry trees and evergreens at the rear help screen telephone poles and other eyesore utilities.

The balcony off the primary bedroom was conceived as an intimate setting for coffee or tea, with seating for two. A vertical wall of English ivy and clematis provides a backdrop for a planter spilling over with grasses, perennials and a redbud tree, an early herald of spring.

Tall bamboo in planters defines the rooftop dining space, overlooking a distinguished building with a copper mansard roof. Fencing is lower on this side of the roof. “We didn’t want to fence the neighbors out completely,” Baron said.

Custom Spanish Cedar fencing, high to match existing adjacent fencing and screen HVAC equipment, frames stunning views of the Brooklyn skyline at the opposite end of the roof. Oversized pots and planters contain a Japanese maple, azaleas, a lilac for spring bloom, and a Hollywood juniper, along with grasses and mixed perennials such as alliums, irises, drift roses, catmint, and coneflower.

[Photos by Anthony Crisafulli]

The Insider is Brownstoner’s weekly in-depth look at a notable interior design/renovation project, by design journalist Cara Greenberg. Find it here every Thursday morning.

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